


in the eye of a hurricane

by sophiegaladheon



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Blood, Canon Compliant, F/M, Hand injury, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Minor Injuries, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-06
Updated: 2019-08-06
Packaged: 2020-08-10 04:28:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20129350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophiegaladheon/pseuds/sophiegaladheon
Summary: Cassian is holding a tray with a cup and a bowl and the sort of multi-purpose kit that could hold anything from bandages to a spare blaster to engine repair tools all balanced precariously on top.  He lifts the tray in offering and Jyn waves him in.  She isn’t truly angry with him, not in this moment, now that that first horrible wave of grief and rage has passed, but she isn’t not angry with him.  Her rage is still smoldering, banked but not extinguished in the hidden corners of her heart.He brought her food, though, which is as good a peace offering as any.Jyn and Cassian, in the space between Eadu and the Alliance Cabinet meeting.





	in the eye of a hurricane

**Author's Note:**

  * For [willow_41z](https://archiveofourown.org/users/willow_41z/gifts).

> This work was created as part of the 2019 Fandom Trumps Hate charity auction! Thank you so much to Ariel for donating!
> 
> The prompt requested Jyn and Cassian finding some peace, short-lived if necessary but not narratively undercut. Hopefully, I've managed to achieve that.
> 
> The title is from _Hamilton_.

The room is small, hardly more than a glorified closet, but it has a bunk and a private washroom and to Jyn that makes it a veritable haven. The door slides shut behind her, engulfing her in a bubble of silence and privacy shut away from the busy hubbub of the Rebellion base. 

The physical aches of the encounter at Eadu have settled into bone-deep bruises, the scrapes scabbing over underneath the hastily applied bandages that she knows from experience will hurt like hell to pull off. But the emotional exhaustion hasn’t worn away one bit; the shock, freshly set aside as their stolen Imperial shuttle sailed away from the devastated research outpost in exchange for a thick blanket of grief, still lurks in the tremors in her hands. 

The sight of her father’s limp form sprawled on the landing platform flashes on the backs of her eyelids every time she blinks.

Jyn can feel the beginnings of tears well and balance precariously in the corners of her eyes. This isn’t something she can do now. She takes a deep breath and pushes herself forward. She has a mission to finish.

For her father. For her mother. For herself. For the whole damn galaxy. She can fall apart once she’s talked a bunch of squabbling politicians into stopping the single biggest weapon the galaxy has ever seen. Or maybe once the monstrous thing is destroyed. Then she can cry. Then she can stop and let go, can give herself permission to mourn. 

But now is not that time. Now she has only a few moments before she has to convince a room full of political idealists and Rebellion cynics to listen to the daughter of an Imperial scientist. 

Jyn steps into the washroom. It’s tiny, barely enough room to stand, but there’s a sink, with real water and a bar of soap by the side, thick and square and smelling of flowers. She strips off her gloves with sharp tugs, the movement of the leather over her scraped knuckles pulling painfully over the fresh abrasions. 

The faucets turn on stiffly with a shriek of metal on metal, cool water flowing into the basin as Jyn grabs the soap and lathers her hands. It’s harsh and aggressive and it stings in all the little cuts as she scrubs but in the good sort of way where it feels like the soap is really doing its job, like it is really getting things clean.

Jyn scrubs at the dirt under her nails. Little rust-red crescents frame her nail beds, slowly flaking and spiraling down the drain off under the assault of soap suds and water.

From when she’d frantically pressed her hands against the wounds in her father's chest, futile against the blood that bubbled up with every breath, seeping over her fingers and into her gloves until Cassian had pulled her away.

The last tiny remnants of that horrible moment, protected from the rain in the crevices of her hands. Until now. She picks up the soap from where she let it drop and scrubs harder.

The flecks of red and brown slough off and swirl down the drain, running together with all the other dirt and blood and dried lymph as Jyn scours her hands raw. Even after she puts down the soap and the water runs clear she can’t stop scrubbing, the sting and the ache only background sensation as she focuses on cleaning away every last speck of debris.

The water is cold enough that her hands eventually start to go numb, and Jyn is practical and well trained enough that that gets her to pull them out from under the stream. She isn’t sure how long she has spent here, carefully cleaning, carefully not thinking about things she cannot afford to dwell on, but she probably doesn’t have too much time before she has to give her pitch to the Alliance Cabinet. 

Jyn leans down and splashes the icy water onto her face. It’s a good, cold shock and it jolts away some of the fog that she hadn’t noticed creeping over her senses.

There isn’t a towel, so she wipes her hands and face dry with the cleanest corner of her shirt and steps out into the bedroom. She leaves the gloves where she dropped them next to the sink. 

The sound of someone at the door prompts something that isn’t quite a sigh from Jyn. She just wants one more moment to gather her thoughts. At least whoever it is was polite enough to knock. The door slides open to reveal Cassian.

She isn’t sure if that makes it better or worse than the random Alliance runner she expected.

Cassian is holding a tray with a cup and a bowl and the sort of multi-purpose kit that could hold anything from bandages to a spare blaster to engine repair tools all balanced precariously on top. He lifts the tray in offering and Jyn waves him in. She isn’t truly angry with him, not in this moment, now that that first horrible wave of grief and rage has passed, but she isn’t not angry with him. Her rage is still smoldering, banked but not extinguished in the hidden corners of her heart.

He brought her food, though, which is as good a peace offering as any.

There isn’t any place to sit in the tiny room apart from the bunk, so they sit there. It turns out Cassian has brought her caf and the sort of reconstituted protein mush which has only the redeeming values of being hot and filling. Jyn has eaten a lot of this kind of terrible food in her life, though, and she wolfs it down with the speed of someone who isn’t sure when they will next have access to a hot meal and can’t quite remember the last one.

As she eats, Cassian clicks open the latches to the kit and starts pulling out supplies. It’s a medical kit; she can see now the tiny insignia stamped next to the handle as Cassian roots through the contents and lays out rolls of bandages and tubes of bacta cream on the bedspread.

“Let me see your hands,” he says as Jyn scrape the last flecks of porridge from her bowl.

It’s a request, softly spoken and with a hint of hesitance Jyn finds so unlike Cassian’s usual determined demeanor. As though he expects to be dismissed out of hand.

That’s enough to get Jyn to keep her anger aside, and, as she exchanges the empty bowl for the hot cup of caf, extending one of her hands out for Cassian’s inspection.

He inspects her scraped and calloused fingers with care, gently turning her palm first one way, then another to see every nick and cut in the dim, faintly blue-tinged light of the Yavin base’s questionably effective lighting infrastructure. His nails are short and jagged but scrupulously clean, she notices, his hands rough and calloused with the markings of a life spent fighting but they are ever so gentle as they inspect her own, equally hardened palms that his fingers barely brush against her skin.

Jyn has been doctored by enough comrades, field medics, droids, and barely less than hostile opponents to know that what Cassian is doing is so careful it barely counts as medical care. But, for all his caution, the brief hesitance from earlier is gone and he goes about his inspection with the thoroughness and dedication of a flight mechanic before a mission. She sips her caf and lets him work. 

Apparently satisfied, Cassian picks up a tube of bacta cream and flicks open the cap. He squeezes a dollop onto her fingers and spreads it over the accumulation of cuts and scrapes.

It tingles a little but nothing compared to the sting of the soap earlier, and Jyn can smell the faint scent of pineapple from the bacta, diluted though it is in cream form. Cassian’s head is bowed as he works, slowly spreading the ointment with far more care than necessary, and Jyn can see him faintly worrying his bottom lip. She takes another drink from her mug to hide the grin that flickers across her face at that—he’s doing it on purpose, letting her see one of his weak spots. No trained operative would have such an obvious tell and not be aware of it. 

She only protests when Cassian reaches for one of the rolls of bandages. “Leave it,” she says, “they’re not that bad.” And when Cassian looks to protest, “I don’t want to face down the Rebel leadership wearing gauze mittens.” She tilts her head consideringly. “Unless you think it would make me more convincing to look like an invalid.”

That earns her a faint chuffed laugh. “No, you’re right,” he says, tucking the bandages back away in the medical kit. “Let me see your other hand?”

Jyn switches her mug to her freshly tended hand and shifts to hold her other one to receive Cassian’s attentions. The scrapes are already healing, she notes as she lifts her mug to finish her caf, the bacta doing its job with enthusiasm. 

Cassian is no less thorough the second time, inspecting and doctoring her hand with the utmost of care. He’s not an easy man to read, Jyn thinks as she peers at him over her mug of now-lukewarm caf. His face is a mask of concentration as he works but it’s just one of many she’s seen him wear. She wonders if they’re easier for her to spot since she wears so many herself. It doesn’t make it any easier to see beneath them, though.

By now the injuries to her second hand have been well cared for, the sting of the bacta at work a familiar feeling across her knuckles. But Cassian has yet to let go of her hand, still carefully smoothing away imagined smears of excess cream with the careful swipe of his thumb.

“Thank you,” Jyn says with a gentle tug of her captive hand. “I am much better now.”

Cassian lets her hand go, dropping his own to his lap. “Good,” he says, “I’m glad.” 

He picks up the tubes of cream and the medical kit, fiddling with the contents until everything is neatly packed away, even tidier than it was to begin with. If this were the lull before an ambush, or if they were tucked away in a safe house on a hostile planet, Jyn would say he is nervous. She’s seen soldiers clean their weapons and reorganize their gear with the kind of restless anxiety she sees now in Cassian, but usually only in the field, in the space where the wait is filled with the dread of all the horrors soon to come.

Here they are safe, or as safe as they can ever be on a Rebellion base and with the threat of an Imperial superweapon hanging over them like a suspended blade. It is only the two of them in this small little room. 

The two of them and her father’s ghost.

Jyn does not want to think of her father right now. She is too angry and sad and sick with guilt, too many emotions with too many targets—her father, the Rebellion, the man in white, the man sitting, head bowed, in front of her now—for her to deal with it all now. And she cannot forget that soon she has to get up in front of the Rebel leadership and convince them of the truth of her father’s final message, of the threat the Empire means to issue.

Jyn is very, very good at setting her feelings aside. She has had lots of practice. And so, she does, shuffling the anger and grief that threaten to reemerge back into the waiting room of her mind to be dealt with later. But she cannot ignore the man in front of her. A man who, she thinks, given the chance, she could learn to feel a great many more emotions for. Positive ones. But that is something else she cannot afford to think about now.

Cassian has stopped fiddling with the medical kit, now set carefully aside, and is sitting almost unnaturally still, his hands clasped tightly in his lap. To a casual observer he might look relaxed, his expression one of careful nonchalance, but Jyn is not a casual observer.

It almost—almost—makes her laugh aloud. If she didn’t know, hadn’t already seen more than sufficient evidence of the fact, she would hardly believe this was one of the Rebellion’s top spies.

Not that she is really one to judge. She doesn’t want to know what Cassian is seeing of her in this moment.

“Are you ready?” Cassian asks, breaking the silence. “They’ll be waiting for you.”

Jyn swallows, flexing her newly mended fingers. The remnants of the cuts still ache slightly, the skin tender. It’s a good ache, though, grounding. 

“As ready as I can be,” she says. She takes a deep breath and asks the question that has been weighing on her mind since the meeting of the Alliance Cabinet was announced, since her father died, since she saw the flickering hologram message in Saw’s base. “Do you think they will believe me?” _Do you think we have a chance?_

Cassian finally, for the first time since he entered the room, looks up, looks her directly in the eye. “If anyone can convince them, it’s you.”

Jyn hasn’t spent her entire life learning to read between the lines to miss the blatant omission in that statement but she elects to let it lie. She will convince the council. She must.

“Thank you,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper.

Cassian doesn’t smile, he is too serious, the moment too somber for that. But there is something in the softness about his eyes that suggests that if they were different people, he would be offering her a reassuring grin.

He gives her one last careful nod before he stands and heads for the door, medical kit in hand. “Good luck,” he says, before slipping out into the base.

Jyn sits in the sudden emptiness of the small room, suddenly so much bigger seeming for the lack of a second body. She swallows the dregs of her cold caf and grimaces. As she sets the mug down, she pauses, her eye caught.

On the bunk where Cassian had sat is a rectangle of synth leather, dark brown and worn. She picks it up. A pair of gloves, clearly much used and cared for, clearly, as she pulls them on, much too small to be Cassian’s.

Jyn tightens the fastener around her wrist. They’re a good fit.

There’s a knock at the door. Jyn squares her shoulders. The respite is over. It’s time to rejoin the fight.


End file.
